"Hey Earl, they just hit the pentagon. Maybe someone should tell Bill?"

"Look, he's at 260. Unless they get the White House, I say we let him have this."

Two possibilities here; either the country was under attack, and not only did this guy decide it was a good time to go bowling, but the bowling ally decided not to close for the day, or; this guy bowled at least one full game before 8:46 am. Not sure which is weirder.

NOAA was just created to spread the woke mind virus by the radical left lunatic [checks notes] Richard Nixon.

Yeah, there have been a lot of attacks targeting AOC by faux-leftists accounts trying to sew discord. I'm not saying that's you, but the discourse around H.R. 1449 was definitely part of that, so I definitely think you were exposed to some asroturfing on that, even if it was indirectly. In most ways, she has a stronger record on Palestinian rights than Bernie, who was slower to condemn Israel than many other progressives, and (to my knowledge) still hasn't used the word, "genocide," to describe what's happening in Gaza. He's still better than the vast majority of Democrats, but AOC has been an even stronger voice, and the attempt to smear her over one symbolic vote definitely seems like it was started by bad actors.

The problem with AIPAC isn't just that it's a powerful lobby, but that it's one of several anti-progressive groups that the left has to contend with in Democratic primaries. Big tech companies (especially Alphabet) are huge spenders, as well as health insurance and big pharma, just to name a few. Fighting all the 150+ AIPAC- funded Democrats s would take a lot of time and energy, and probably won't resonate as much with the average voter as something like health care would. I think the best strategy is to find the most vulnerable centrists and hammer them on all fronts. You'd probably have a better chance ousting someone like John Fetterman by pointing out that he's taken money from the Pro-Israel lobby, Wall Street, the health care industry, and Google rather than fighting 17 Senate Democrats at once over AIPAC money.

The most important thing, though, is to defend progressives who are under attack from AIPAC. The next time someone like Cori Bush is targeted by AIPAC, people need to fund her, volunteer for her, and most importantly, refuse to allow the Israel lobby to equate condemning a genocide with antisemitism.

Hey, "um, actually," is half my comments, so I can't talk. Also, thanks for the info. It was a conspiracy theory that I heard a couple of times but never bothered to look up.

Well, first of all:

clearly the rest of the Democrat left didn't share her worry about giving their enemies ammunition

Three members of the squad voted against it. Two of them are Muslim women from districts with large Muslim populations. The third lost her primary after AIPAC targeted her for criticizing Israel.

As for the rest of your comment, if you wanted to know why she voted for it, you could look it up. She commented on it at the time. She said it was a non-binding resolution, it didn't directly use the problematic IHRA definition, but only references a State Department guideline that passively mentions the IHRA definition, and that if it had directly used IHRA language she would have voted against it. I'll be honest, though, you don't seem like you want your questions answered, you seem like you want to complain.

She's consistently voted against of sending weapons to Israel, she attempted to block the sale of arms to Israel before October 7th, and she's called what's happening in Gaza a genocide on the House floor. I can count on one hand the number of House/Senate Democrats that have a record like that. She signed on to a mostly symbolic resolution rather than give her enemies ammunition by voting against, "Condemning the global rise of antisemitism and calling upon countries and international bodies to counter antisemitism." I get not liking the IHRA definition of antisemitism, but please, get some fucking perspective.

Calling it now, this is the Coke/New Coke/Coke Classic strategy. Coke was good, New Coke sucked, and when they went back to Coke Classic, people were so happy they didn't even notice that they swapped out the sugar for corn syrup. They were HBO Max, then they became Max, added in a bunch of reality TV slop, and dropped a bunch of their other content. I bet they'll announce they're bringing back half of the library they dropped for the 30 House Hunters spin-offs they added and hope people will count it as a win.

I'll be honest, I find that guy super annoying, but I appreciate you sharing it with me. It definitely makes me feel validated that someone else felt the same way

I'd like to believe you, but that could just be hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance.

Yeah, it wasn't even that the first one was bad, it's just that all the things they mentioned in passing, like the New Founding Fathers and the exemptions for Level 10 Government Officials, were building a world that sounded super interesting. Then we got saddle with some boring rich family for 90 minutes. I only got around to seeing the first sequel, but it delivered on all the stuff I wanted to see after I heard that first announcement.

The original Purge. I thought all the background stuff and setting were super interesting, but the film itself was a generic home invasion movie. The sequel expanded on all the stuff I was interested in, though.

This has to be satire. Please, someone tell me it's satire.

Fuck David Plouffe. He's been trying to sell this bullshit since November 6th. He went on Pod Save America to explain what went wrong with the Harris campaign. Did he admit that they should have distanced themselves from Biden on Gaza? Or that campaigning with Liz Cheney and targeting moderate Republicans was a failed strategy? Or that their middle-class platform cost them working-class voters? Nope! The conclusion he came to was that they did everything right, but they just didn't have enough time. Joe Biden should live out his remaining years in shame and isolation for refusing to step down, but Plouffe's campaign strategy was political malpractice, and he his failures can't be blamed in senility.

I think there's legitimate self-delusion that keeps some of them believing the centrist is the safe choice. Some of them delude themselves into thinking that being centrist is a good idea because people don't like, "wokeness." Some of them convince themselves that if they're too progressive, the donors will abandon them and they won't have enough money to win. I think the old timers like Carvil legitimately think that centrism is the best strategy because they can't get past 1992. But yeah, I think deep down, they would all prefer losing with a neoliberal centrist than winning with an actual progressive, even if some of them won't admit it.

The problem is that the party has a lot of control over the primary; they can keep people off the ballot, they can decide who gets to debate, they can set a primary schedule that favors preferred candidates...The reason we got Biden in 2020 was because Barack Obama made a bunch of phone calls and got everyone who would have spit Biden's vote share to drop out. Progressives need to spend the next four years calling out this corruption and excising these people from the party at the state and national levels.

I doubt he's engaged in anything. The man's brain is gone. He said that legitimately believed the Supreme Court ruled in his favor on Abrego Garcia because his staff told him so, and I believe him. He doesn't have the cognitive function to keep up with what's happening, so he's just doing what Stephen Miller tells him to do.

It's just insane. People are so desperate for change that they're willing to vote for fascism, and the Democrats are trying to put run a moderate conservative. If they're not completely delusional, then they must believe the James Carvils of the party who are telling them they just have to wait for the Republicans to become unpopular again to take power. In the best case scenario, they'll win in four years, then lose in another 4 (probably to a more competent fascist) because people will see they're not doing anything for them.

They don't want a safe candidate. A safe candidate would be someone who takes broadly popular positions, like Medicare for All, a jobs guarantee, or public internet. They want centrist candidates, which the consultant class has convinced them is safe (and, coincidentally, never take positions that upset the donors), but centrism is the least safe position to take at this point. No one who is watching their wages stagnate while the cost of living skyrockets is thinking, "I hope this can be solved through incremental changes that don't disrupt that status-quo too much!"

Houndstooth Redding.